‘Der Fuehrer’s Face': “The Great Psychological Song” of WWII

While most of the war-themed hit songs of 1942 did little more than express either a saccharine sense of sentimentality or a unified feeling of martial patriotism, it is clear from the first few seconds of the big fall hit for Spike Jones & His City Slickers that the listening audience was in for something much different than the average torch-song or ballad.  An arch-satirist known for his barbed parodies of popular songs of the day, Jones and His City Slickers, on September 26, 1942, took aim not at those acts currently at the top of the Billboard charts, but at the ‘Horst Wessel Lied:’  the national anthem of the Nazi Party.  Replacing the militaristic marching rhythm of the original with a fast-paced, irreverent oom-pah, Jones and his band make a mockery of the Nazi state song; the ridicule approaching near-riotous levels of scorn when the lyrics begin:

Ven Der Fuehrer says, “We iss der master race!”
Ve heil! Heil! Right in Der Fueher’s face
Not to love Der Fuehrer is a great disgrace
So ve Heil! Heil! Right in Der Fuehrer’s face

The mood and tone of the song is made even more ridiculous by the accompaniment of each shouted ‘Heil’ with a loud Raspberry or Bronx Cheer produced by Jones through the use of a rubber razzer.

Originally written and published by Disney Studio composer, Oliver Wallace, who had also previously contributed music to Disney’s Dumbo, Alice In Wonderland, and Peter Pan, it was Jones’ version that drove sales of the sheet music and the record, which ultimately would climb to #3 in the charts on November 7. Jones’ rendition of ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ proved so massively successful that a year later it lent its name to one of Disney’s most popular and memorable wartime shorts starring Donald Duck, previously known as ‘Donald Duck in Nutziland.’  Oscar Hammerstein III, of the famed songwriting partnership of Rodgers & Hammerstein, considered Jones’ skewering of the Third Reich so masterful that he called ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face’ ‘the great psychological song of the war.’

Click below to hear and sing along with Spike Jones & His City Slickers’ original version of ‘Der Fuehrer’s Face:’

Post by Collin Makamson, Red Ball Express Coordinator at The National WWII Museum